The end

I made it back to London carrying-on my gigantic backpack just in time to meet the four English boys for some drinks and a night out. With a few ciders and more techno than I could appreciate, we played pool throughout the evening before heading back to the house for wine, Swiss chocolate and some reminiscing about their time in the States (07-08) and my experiences traveling and in Italy.

On Monday I hopped on a plane that in the course of 16 hours had me back to the west coast. I turned my cell phone on to receive a series of messages regarding my account, and a few well-planned texts welcoming me home. I can't believe I'm back.

Looking back on my trip, I couldn't be more happy with my experiences. I had a great time traveling during the first portion, getting that classic American college grad western Europe sightseeing tour out of the way. But by far my time on the farms are what made the trip exactly what I wanted and meant the most to me.

This entire trip was meant to be two things for me. First, it was to re-acquaint me with old friends abroad and Second it was to be a period of time to relax, refocus and recenter before starting the next stage of my life.

I'm spending two weeks in Reno (until the 10th) before I go back to San Diego, where I'm giving myself one month to find a decent job and two months to find a serious job (as in one that is career focused/what I actually want to do with my life). I'm fortunate to have some friends who are willing to pull out their sofa beds for me during that time as I definitely have no income, home, or car and very minimal savings after this trip.

As for jobs, I've been doing lots of research of companies and organizations that I'm interested in since I arrived back to the States. Applying to jobs is a time consuming process!! I adjust my resume quite a bit between each job so as to highlight my more relevant experience and adjust my letter of application and it takes forever!!

If you'd like to follow my life since Europe and all of my future blogs, check out stephusry.blogspot.com. (I promise I won't make you subscribe to anything else!)
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Some things about Italy

Over my 1.5 months in Italy, I recognized again and again similarities that appeared throughout the country. I share them here.

1. The people are extraordinary friendly (but most don't speak English)
2. Nothing and no one is on time. Buses, rides, everything runs late (today's bus was 30 minutes behind schedule).
3. The food is spectacular, and the gelato. But this applies to food cooked at Italian homes, not restaurants. Particularly I've liked the spinach tortellini.
4. The mosquitoes in the countryside are evil and torture those of us not used to them. I'm allergic to their bites so they last for days and when they go away they leave bruises!
5. Good words to know are Dove (where) and subsequently a sinistra and a destra (left and right) so you can then follow the directions they give.
6. There is always a main street named Via Roma in every city.
7. You must put the toilet seats down each time you use the toilet because they raise themselves automatically and stay up. (Talk about a culture in which the masculine is the standard!)
8. The headline of today's regional paper exclaimed that a child swallowed a torch and they are now afraid he will have to undergo a long operation (reading newspapers to work on my Italian)
9. Italy is Very hot in August. And humid. And it's crowded because all of Europe is on holiday this month. Choose a different month if you visit here.
10. It is not okay to put your feet on the seat of a train if you have shoes on. If you take them off and then put your bare feet up that is okay. Old people in particular have no problem wiggling their finger at you in disaprovement if you don't obey this unwritten rule.
11. Don't buy pasta dishes at restaurants (particularly in Rome). Find a local to invite you for their mothers cooking if you want delicious, extraordinary Italian food. Otherwise go find a pizza place that charges by the weight of the slice for the best food and best prices.
12. "Di" is the term used to get your attention, or to express frustration/anger/give a lecture to a small child.

I'm sure there's more, but at this point these are of the most importance.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

24 Hours of Interlaken

For some reason I really wanted to visit Switzerland during this Europe trip and due to other travels it just didn't make it onto the list. But with 3 rides left on my Eurail pass and the knowledge that the country wasn't too far away, my friend Tom looked up what cities were good to visit and I made a reservation for the train from Milan.

I was very sad to leave La Vecchia Posta, and I will admit that a few tears fell when I said my goodbyes this morning (and I wasn't the only one). But when else in life will I have a chance to hop over to Switzerland for a short weekend?

The train ride from Milan gave me a hint that the weather was going to be less than ideal during my time in Switzerland as grey clouds hung around the mountain peaks and rain lightly pattered on the windows. I've definitely been rained on here more than even in Ireland (more in that it's more consistent and heavy rain than Ireland had) But the sights are fantastic! Waterfalls amongst jagged cliff walls, lakes after every other tunnel. And mountains jutting up in every direction.

I could tell when we had crossed the Italian/Swiss border due simply to the fact that the houses changed from the yellow/orange Italian style villas to the idyllic image of a Swiss cottage. Wooden paneling outlining squares of white for the walls, a sloped roof, and always green shutters opening the windows to the world.

Interlaken is in between two great and gorgeous lakes named Thunersee and Brienzersee. The town is known as the extreme/adventure sport capital of Europe and many of the guidebooks one can find talk of skydiving, canyoning, and bungee jumping.

I stayed in a lovely B&B called the Rugenbacher, run by a man, woman, and their dog. I don't know what I would have done with my time in the city without their advice. From the moment I walked in the door of the office Ursula made me feel at home with a nice cup of tea and then started to rattle off all of the priority spots to see...in 24 hours.

Right off the bat she sent me running to catch a boat that would take me across one of the lakes, stopping off at various little towns and providing a great spot to see some amazing views, I stalled a minute to search for my camera and then ran 2 blocks to catch the boat. On board though I realized something...my camera was nowhere to be found though I had thought I saw it in my purse. Definitely not good. On board the boat I focused on the amazing views, I even bared sitting in the chilly rain for about 45 minutes so I could see up to the tops of the mountains. Breathtaking.

I noticed that the boats half way point was the station was where my train began that I lost the camera on. (I remember distinctly that I took it out for a picture from Spiez to Interlaken) The station was about a 25 minute walk from the ferry dock, but I enjoyed the walk (even if it was raining). I got to the office and inquired about a camera, figured out the train I was on, and found out that my best bet would be to fill out a loss form online. So I road the train back and stopped at my hotel to get recommendations for dinner.

Swiss food. Definitely. Ursula sent me to the Baron, a traditional Swiss restaurant where, I found out on arrival, their local specialty is horse. I definitely couldn't do that, so I ended up with a local sausage and some delicious hashbrowns (a Swiss specialty, found in almost every meal). Ooo it was delicious and warm and the service was so wonderful and friendly! And Swiss beer is delicious (it didn't have a name on the menu, just beir).

The next morning I got up early and went down for breakfast. There I got talking with the other owner, Chris. Originally from Virginia, he came to Switzerland about 20 years ago and 2 days before he was set to return to the States he tore up his ticket. For the first 10 years he would spend six months working (usually doing dishes at a local ski resort) making $16/hour, for the last 6 months of the year he'd go traveling with his savings. What a life! About 7 years ago he settled down with Ursula and the B&B, promising himself he'd stay settled for 10 years before jetting off again. His brother is a professional glassblower in San Francisco. He had great stories.

Then I hopped on a train, then bus, to go visit the Trummelbach Falls. A series of 10 glacial waterfalls inside the mountain. It was pretty spectacular. Just imagine the amount of noise that you'd be surrounded by in a cave with 10 gigantic waterfalls crashing down around you. It was spectacular! I made friends with a few Australians here to hanglide (but were grounded due to rain and so being tourists) and battled my way through a gigantic flock of Indian tourists to stand near the edge of a few of the falls. Fortunately I was the only one to think to take the stairs back down after about an hour inside the caves, so I was on my own to see the lower 4 falls, one of which was the "corkscrew", so cool!

When I got back to town I had about an hour before I had to catch another train, so I went souvenier shopping at the local specialty chocolate shop. I'm sooo glad they let you have tasters before buying!

So with chocolate in my belly sufficing as lunch I'm on the way to Milan where I'll fly to London for a night with the English boys (Matt, Tom, Ed, Phil) before flying back to the US Monday!

Life at la Vecchia

I don't know that I could have come to a more peaceful and perfect place for the last three weeks. Atop our hill in Avolasca I am with my head as if in the clouds. Anywhere I look outside of my quaint apartment I see rolling green hills speckled with vineyards and other square plots of farmland that have been tilled or are ripe with their produce.

The most constant sound is the bi-hourly tolling of the belltower, and if you're in the right place you can hear the echo from the other hilltop village belltowers as well. Since we harvested the first round of grapes, the sound of the wine cooler is another constant outside of my kitchen window, reminding me of the intensive process that our delicately picked grapes are now undergoing to become the delicious Rebelot, Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Barbara wines that we enjoy at each meal.

Many hours of my days are spent on my own, doing some task such as picking tomatoes, basil, or zucchini. I have soooo much time to think and mull over my life so far and what is to come. Even when working in the vineyard picking grapes I have lots of time to think, sometimes I will engage in a conversation with Lisa, my German friend, but often even working with ten people around the Italian being spoken is so quickly I can't follow it and so I am more or less with my own thoughts anyway.

And while it sounds lonely (and yes sometimes it is) I'm completely 100% happy at every moment. I'd rather come WWOOF for my holidays in the future than go lye on a beach somewhere. I'm getting a tan, eating amazing food, and relaxing because I don't have any real responsibility. I simply wake up when I do in the morning, eventually someone in the family summons me to tell me what I'm doing for the day, and I work away. Often the work is physically challenging, to pick grapes you have to be bent over, you get all scratched up by the vines when you reach in for a bundle of grapes, spiders and wasps are abundant and happy to bite, and the Italian sunshine is beating down on you. If I had to do this work I might mind, but that I'm choosing to do it and am learning about the entire process through doing it I am completely happy to work long hours without pay.

The family that is hosting me is wonderful as well. Annime is originally from Belgium but she came to Italy over 20 years ago and never left. Roberto is originally from here and is the one who convinced Anime to stay. They have a big and diverse farm, bed and breakfast, and restaurant (only open on weekends). They farm grapes, apples, peaches, more apples, pears, and they have a garden which produces all the vegetables and herbs that Annime uses in the restaurant throughout the year.

September is the busy harvesting month here, so the restaurant has been closed and Annime spends most of her time preparing the pasta sauces, jams, herbs, desserts and vegetables that will be used while Roberto oversees the farm and the winemaking.

Winemaking is cool by the way. And it's also not nearly as glamorous as one would think. But I like it, it involves a whole detailed and calculating plan that revolves around more external circumstances than is nice for it to be executed properly. I've learned about the whole series of steps used to make most of the wines they do here. From how to cut, to getting the grapes off of the vines (with a nifty machine) to spending hours transferring the juice away from the peel so some special enzymes can do their work before we transfer the juice back in to mix with the peels again, deepening the color of the red wine. Its a fascinating process and there are so many little steps that can be done in so many minimally different ways that effect the final outcome of the wine. For example with most wine when we pour it into a new tank we pour into the top. But today with pinot noir we had to insert a tube into the bottom of the tank and it filled from there because its bad for the wine to be poured from the top because it gets too much air and bubbles, somehow effecting some of the chemical composition. It's such an art!

As I said, I am completely in love with my time here. I've become good buddies with Matteo (their 9 year old son) and over hot cocoa some days we teach each other Italian and English words that are useful. And we do yoga. Matteo loves yoga :)

Next Friday I take my last trip, to Interlaken, Switzerland, where I'll spend 24 hours before I go to Milan for a flight back to London on Saturday night. And in another 36 hours I'll find myself at Heathrow boarding a flight to bring me back to the US. I don't want this time to be coming to an end. I will absolutely cherish these last few days.

Thankfully I have an open invitation to come back and WWOOF here at La Vecchia Posta whenever I want. Maybe in my job hunt (to begin when I arrive back in the US) I'll find somewhere willing to let me abandon ship for a month to come back and find my solitude on the farm here in Italy. I hope :)

La Veccia Posta-My most recent home

So its has been a while since I've been able to send updates, that is in part because they keep me VERY busy here, also in part because they only have internet access on their computer for one hour per day...so my time online is spent making plans and sending a few important emails (this post being one of them!)

La Veccia Posta is located in a very, very small village. I think there are maybe 12 different families that live here. But it is not a lonlely village as from its hilltop perch one can see about 10 other villages of roughly the same size adorning various hilltops. It feels like classic Italy here. None of the locals speak English, old folks sit on benches and cast you glances with raised eyebrows when they can't place where you belong, and the countryside is endless.

It is absolutely beautiful. A complete escape from suburban life. I think this is the best place for me to finish a whirlwind of a trip before I go back to my whirlwind life (well, my whirlwind of establishing a life as I have no home, job, or stuff to go back to!)

Laundry swings from lines as you walk down the street and you can stop at any peach tree if you're hungry for a snack. There is a beautiful silence that overwhelmes this part of the world, except when a tractor pulls by with its harvest for the day or the hilltop churches from all the towns chime to let the townspeople know how far away the lunch hour is.

Everything is really beautiful, quaint, and wonderful. But the work is hard. I've now been here for 5 days and we spend at least 8 hours each day doing some type of work for the farm. I've now become a skilled picker of apples, grapes, peaches, cucumbers, basil, zucchini, and tomatoes. I think I diced about 10 pounds of apples today to make a pie. I've learned to make green tomatoe jelly (strange but delicious) and I've come down with and gotten over a horrible stomach flu (probably from the fact that all of the food is from the farm, so it has lots more bacteria than I am accustomed to).

I have lots of time to think here, not because I am alone but because most conversations that happen around me are in Italian. But I am slowly, ever so slowly, able to understand bits of the language. My limited Spanish has helped me some with the vocabulary and I find that if I really pay attention I can get a grasp of the subjects that they are talking about. It's tough, but it's exactly what I was hoping for.

On my second day here I secretly baked traditional chocolate chip cookies because I found out that it is my host mom, Annemie's, birthday. Though she caught me in the act of baking, she and the entire family (and everyone who comes to help on this farm, daily there are new random people that do this or that around the farm) loved them! Of course they had always heard about these cookies and they have purchased those ones from the store that are hard and not at all like home made ones. So I think I got in with them by that little effort right away. Reminder though, they do not use cups, tablespoons, or teaspoons for measurement here. Without acecss to converters, I just kind of guessed at the amounts of things I was putting in and after about an hour of adding more of this or that (oh and they dont have brown sugar either) I actually managed some decent cookies! I was very proud.

Tonight we have the true birthday celebration, with lots of food (that we prepared the last two days), someone is bringing an accordian, I've set up my travelling tent for the kids, and I am very excited that my (seemingly) coworker and friend Lisa is coming for the party. She WWOOF'd here a year ago from Germany and found a boyfriend and has stayed for over a year now. Im so happy to have her as she's the only person near my age, and one of the few people that speak English.

Overall I am very happy. I am working on getting used to the quiet, solitude, and hard work but overall I think it's exactly what I was hoping for. I'm starting to make plans for my return to London at the end of the month from where I then fly home! I still dont know that Im ready to go back to life in the States, but I do know that I have 2.5 more weeks to enjoy myself here. And that I will do!

Updates will probably be infrequent, but I'll do my best!!

Goodbye to Villa Sampaguita

My last few days at Villa Sampaguita were wonderfully relaxing, somewhat busy, but overall fantastic. Life there is ideallic, every morning I would rise from bed around 7:30 to go downstairs for a breakfast of freshly picked fruit, some tea, and home made bread and jam. Then we'd gather ourselves together as Tim layed out the days work (with our important 3 hour afternoon nap and relaxing time planned in) before we'd head out the door to get to work.

During my 5 days at Villa Sampaguita I got to:

-Clear an old vineyard of the poles that held the vines (hard work!)

-Build a greenhouse

-Construct the doors of the greenhouse and the doorframes from old scrap wood (it was like a big geometry puzzle game)

-Load and unload a few truckloads of 'fertilizer' from the neighboring horse stables

-Drink lots of delicious wine and enjoy as much wonderful cooking

-Attend a wine/proscioutto tasting event at a nearby winery

-Try a local delicacy, raw sausage (questionable, yes)

-Learn how to life a wine glass with a toothpick

-Get lots of goodnight kisses from Harriet, the 18 month old princess of the farm

-Learn lots about soil quailty and how to get good soil

-Hear a lot about plans to build a forest (Tim has plans to turn the back portion of his property into a forest with some EU stimulus funding) And with this came lots of information on EU farming policies

It was a really amazing 5 days at the farm with the family and I can't wait to return there as a friend and a guest. They were wonderful hosts who have lived inspiring lives and whose beliefs about life I found to be very much in line with my own. I had a wonderful time there, learned a lot, and definitely made some lifelong friends. So many thanks to them for having me!

Now if you ever take a trip to Italy and want to visit the famous wine region of Piemonte (Piedmont), you should absolutely go and visit Villa Sampaguita. They are wonderful hosts, will help arrange your day trips, will cook for you, and are all-in-all super nice hosts.More info at www.villasampaguita.com

But for me, my time was up and I headed off early one morning to go to a farm outside of nearby Tortona (about 1 hour by train away). I will spend my last three weeks of this European adventure on a small family farm in the Piedmont hills of Avalosca with a Belgian woman, her Italian husband, their son, and an array of fields, fruits, and livestock to keep me company.

Manual Labor but La Vida

My second day on the farm showed me that they don't always work quite as hard as we did on my first day.

For the morning they needed to run to the market for some supplies, so I got to accompany the family into Asti for the outdoor market and official bag-carrier girl. Marina and I went off for household shopping while the men and little Harriet went to look at tools and other play-things.

These markets are quite different from ones at home and I love them. The indoor market is a permanent place, essentially the equivalent of an USian (more on the term 'American later'). Each vendor has their particular genre of ware to sell, one for chicken meat, a pescaterian for fish, the bread man, a cheese shop. And you wander between all these specialists to order your freshly butchered meat. In the fish section you actually see the fish you're going to eat and, if you'd like, you can watch them be de-finned and de-boned right there on the spot (or you do it at home yourself later). I talked with Marina about how different this is than in the US, where our food (even what is presented as fresh at the butchers in the back) is already so de-animalized that you look at fillets instead of the actual fish they come from. And here they really are whole, eyes, gills, fins-you can see it all. If you've ever read Michael Pollen you'd know what I'm referring to in noticing how far removed we are in the US from our food, most things are already so processed and packaged we don't really think of the physical animal/shape it originally came from.

Anyway, while I squeemed and tried to come to terms with seeing my dinner in a life-like form, Marina was amazed at how sheltered we are from our food so she made sure to take me by a number of other life-like meals to see what I thought.

When we were finished stocking up at the markets, we made our way home for the afternoon meal and naps.

And I realized they're not so intense about their work schedules as they made out to be on day 1. We got going around four and put up the plastic covering for the winter greenhouse, including stringing rope over it to hold it down and digging trenches along the sides to ensure the side tarp was held down. We took apart the old greenhouse doors and then the day was over, Tim was tired so we went in for the day with plans to finish the doors tomorrow.

Before dinner I did a little front yard yoga session and practiced headstands with Marina before we made our way to the outdoor dinner table under the terrace for a lovely meal of roasted bell peppers, potatoes and salad. We had a lovely bottle of red wine from the local vineyard Vaudano and then these absolutely heavenly amaretto cookies called Amaretti di Mombaru LLO (last three letters are the initials of the three Asti ladies that made these cookies so popular in the region). They're honestly heaven.

And with extra wine for this evening, we had a table debate on the classification of music into genres and, well, just one of those conversations about music that last until everyone is rather intoxicated and ready for bed. Another wonderful day gone by here!